sarakingdom

1 hour ago, Everstorm said:

That is approximately the nonplussed expression I'm going to be wearing for a while. Don't take it personally.

I feel somewhat better today. Also, I lost seven pounds overnight. Since that's not real, I shall assume it was seven literal pounds of stress, and project "hydration, rest, google 'physical stored stress' obsessively and gentle movement" worked out yesterday. I will keep doing that as much as possible.

1 minute ago, Heidi said:

We're halfway through eclipse season

Coincidentally, I'm halfway through Ladyhawke. The script is better than it should be, the soundtrack is worse than it should be.

19 hours ago, Jarric said:

Despite the chocolate and wine, which put me ~1,500kcal over target for the week, I lost 0.8lbs this week

I too wish to enjoy the benefits of the all-chocolate-and-wine diet.

1 hour ago, Scaly Freak said:

Before I act, do you need a hug, or do you need help luring a target to a remote location? I'll provide either one, but it gets awkward when I guess wrong.

I think in this case, we'd better go for a hug.

Just now, Kishi said:

I mean, all the Little Problems being part of a gestalt phenomenon known as A Problem is legit.

I'm there. I had one final frustration and started crying. Not a normal day.

I feel icky today. Not sick, just out of sorts in every possible way. My sleep has been off, my hydration has been a bit off, my movement has been low, my brain has been unfocused all week, my joints and muscles have been cranky, my moods have been cranky... everything is just a little bit terrible. Not terrible enough to be A Problem, just terrible enough to be annoying.

'Kay, guys, I've got a wizard to finish pandering to. But in small chunks, cuz that's all I've got in me.

My planner divides my day into chunks of a few hours, and that's about the planning horizon I can handle right now. To make him even happier, I will divide my hours into proper Newtonian quarters.

1 hour ago, Mad Hatter said:

Her other carer is so good with her, and laughs off everything, and I feel like a complete asshole because I can't be like that. 

It's personal to you in a way it isn't to other carers. And it's also not a career you chose, the way it is for them, but something you have to do regardless of choice or aptitude. It would be surprising if you were able to be as detached.

2 hours ago, Mad Hatter said:

Then A gets pissed again because of the carer and asks me why the hell she's in the house and I tell her straight that it's because the doctor says so and then she gets upset and starts crying. I know she's sick, and confused and there's a lot of emotions

There is, I think, an art (and possibly even a professional discussion) about the right lies to tell to dementia patients to keep the world from overwhelming them. It doesn't come naturally to me, because I always want to get through to people with the truth, but apparently sometimes the expert advice is to not shake the fantasy world that gives them security. In the same way that a drunk person can't sober up and think straight from being reasoned with, a dementia patient can't be unconfused by going through the facts with them, and the job is keeping them calm and not in pain in their world, rather than bringing them back to the real world. I don't know the right way to do it and can't give advice (and it is of course a lot harder when you need to persuade them to actually do something in the process), but it gave me a lot to think about, thinking back to past interactions with relatives, to realize I was actually supposed to lie to them, not correct them.

2 hours ago, Mad Hatter said:

I wish I knew how to get rid of this feeling of simmering anger, besides blowing up in someone's face. My movement tools are not helpful in this situation, slow breathing makes me angrier. 

Ugh, the worst. Try action movies. Other people's big dramatic problems (preferably done with all the realism of a comic book) can be very distracting, vicarious conflict can be very cathartic, and with none of the pressure of being mature or controlled or making an effort.

(Or sleep. Sometimes it's just better to reboot the brain entirely, with a little recharge time to replace exhausted resources. It's probably burning through a ton of energy with all this.)

1 hour ago, Sea-to-sky said:

Ok, now im curious, you cant just say things like that and not expect me to ask what your reading. 

Just the series my challenge is based on. I haven't really had time for pleasure reading, apart from the latest novella in that series, because it finally came in at the library. Rivers of London does have an unusual relationship arc over the series, though no individual book is very relationship-centric. (Maybe some the two latest ones, because of the direction it took.) Despite that, and the fact that all the books are perfectly acceptable for YA readers, it does manage to earn the ruder 'gt' rating in one or two books.

Which is actually a big tell for a male author (and a rare positive one), and I feel more reviews should lead with that.

6 hours ago, Sea-to-sky said:

😆the book is the devil in winter by lisa kleypas if that helps with the context. 

Hrm, I've read some Kleypas before, and that doesn't really help, as that character both has a giant todger and is a giant todger. (In the best sense. He makes it work for him.)

6 hours ago, Sea-to-sky said:

it could be good tension (as in plot tension)

Or, indeed, as in sexual tension. Yeah, it's probably one of those.

(Sadly. Because I think all of mine should be the standard ways books are reviewed, even outside the romance genre. Hrm, I'm not sure my current challenge books are doing much of anything on the giant todger scale, but they do actually pass one of the more rude 'gt' tests in at least a couple of books...)

1 hour ago, Everstorm said:

Giant/tiny is the only one I know of

"Giant todger" is the cleanest of the options I'm not repeating.

1 hour ago, Radost said:

You know when there’s a thing you want to do, it’s easy, it’s right there, but you Just Can’t Initiate The Task?

*stares in ADHD*

 I finished up my notes and headed up to the coach house. Which is how I came to catch Nightingale making himself comfortable on the sofa with a can of Nigerian Star Beer in one hand and the rugby on the TV. He had the grace to look embarrassed.    

"I didn't think you'd mind," he said. "There's two crates of this stuff in the corner."

13 hours ago, Sea-to-sky said:

gt = no idea about this one, any ideas?

I can't think of any that I wish to repeat in mixed company, anyway.

10 hours ago, WhiteGhost said:

It turns out that her daughter is not doing great in school and as a punishment the mom decided that the best way to punish her for it was to get rid of her cat. 

7 hours ago, Mad Hatter said:

Do you need a body double to try the body doubling?  

YES. YES I DO.

6 hours ago, Jarric said:

I love that - the man can certainly turn a phrase. My favourite line from today was today "The British had made if clear they didn't want to see them again on pain of sarcasm."

He does have a nice dryly funny prose style, and a good feel for language.

6 hours ago, Jarric said:

On a related note, I finished Winter's Gifts this evening. Very much enjoyed it, and also with the limited amount of reading that I do I thoroughly appreciate novellas (novellae?).

Yeah, he's good with the novella length, pretty much the heft of a full novel in half the space.

6 hours ago, Sea-to-sky said:

Gene hunt probubly refers to a character from a british tv series called life on mars. (Excellent show, highly recommended if you can get it in your country).  Its set mostly in the 80’s and is a police drama. Gene hunt is the chief inspector and in command of the Manchester and Salford police division. He is the main characters superior officer. 

Yeah, Gene Hunt is a big, blustering Northern DCI from 1970s Manchester - loud and blunt and swearing and offensive, and aggressively 1970s blue collar man's man in his leadership style. He's sort of an assembled archetype of gritty 1970s cop dramas, like The Sweeney and various gritty Northern things. The kind of archetype a big Northern DCI (and someone writing one) might find useful, and also subvert in increasingly telling ways.

(It is a fun show.)

7 hours ago, Mad Hatter said:

Personally I think that if I'm consciously aware of weird pacing while reading, and it loses me, it's flawed.

I differentiate "not gonna work for me" from "not well crafted". Stories can be either one without necessarily being the other, and being able to describe the difference is a big help in recommending things to others and knowing my own tastes better. And also I generally think life would be happier if more people differentiated subjective dislike from objective badness. (Like Pratchett and his "the root of all evil is treating people like things", my addendum is that the root of a surprising amount of unpleasantness is the failure to differentiate subjective preference from an objective truth.  I was discussing this with a friend recently, because I stumbled across a place where that conflation was being used to radicalize in the culture war to neo-Nazi pipeline.)

But there's also a ton of gray area; no expressive exercise is perfect, so even "well crafted" doesn't mean"not flawed", and pinning that down is particularly tricky when you can't tell what it was aiming for or how it was crafted or whatever. Usually you can get some of that, and sometimes it's really not clear at all. Unlikely to be the cleanest of intents and executions if so, but it's not clear what's the craft and what's what I'm bringing to it.

In these books, what I was bringing to it turned out to make a difference to how much I understood what sort of fictional universe I was in, what its values were and so on. I didn't entirely get that until fairly late, but I don't put a lot of that on the books. They are slow burn, but it was more to do with the genre experience I was coming in with and the storytelling expectations I had. (Oddly, the only place those values come close to being broken are in the first book, which is one of the reasons I feel it has first season syndrome. It's not wildly out of skew with the later books, but just enough that it's the one book I think might be a little misleading about the genre expectations a reader should have.)

9 hours ago, Mad Hatter said:

I can see why he'd want to get away from the epic fantasy battle at the end though. It's a real problem in fantasy writing, especially for series where each book ends up with a bigger, badder battle until you can't get any further

Yeah, exactly. I think it's a plot structure that has usefulness and meaning, but it's not been done a service by becoming The Norm. It's not a natural fit for every story, and the escalation is very difficult to do, and can get kind of silly. It's also not the only meaningful stakes to talk about. Sometimes the most personal, least epic stakes hit the hardest. Also I'm just a bit tired of it being everywhere. Even places it really doesn't work, like Doctor Who.

It's part of why it took me so long to understand I was slightly misreading these books, because I was subconsciously expecting that structure. It wasn't until the Major Epic Plot Arcs introduced in books one and two fully played out (and some incidental things that happened in the course of that) that I realized I'd been a little off about the basic nature of the universe and the story being told in it. Not hugely. I got it enough to get the characters and so on. I was just off on the emphasis and where to trust the story and so on.

7 hours ago, Mad Hatter said:

As someone who's lived in the UK but not British I could easily pick up on the differences, but a lot of the subtleties is probably lost on me. I think that's fine. I feel like if the fundamental premise and storytelling are solid then the subtleties shouldn't matter. It's an extra layer that makes it funner or more interesting for people in the know. But even if I didn't get all the references (like I don't even know who Gene Hunt is) I can still appreciate the love letter aspect and the diversity of the cast at a more abstract level.

Yes, I think I agree. It may not work the very same way, but that doesn't mean it doesn't work. (I think I disagree that the subtleties don't matter in the sense that not having any would be apparent to the reader - but readers don't have to, and likely won't, agree on where or what they are. The exact nature of them doesn't matter a ton.) There may be more meaning (or jokes) there for people who understand them, but they contribute a lot of worldbuilding and the feeling of authenticity and richness to people who don't, too. (And for all I know, I'm in the latter position with regards to all the Sierra Leonian, Nigerian, and Somali cultural references. A ton of those specific cultural references are totally new to me, and people who have lived in Africa may be seeing massive things I don't have any idea is there.)

He said something in some of these interviews I watched about not letting the publishers change things to be more accessible to international audiences, because, essentially, the main thing of value a book had to offer was its authentic voice, and that was more important - even if it wasn't as accessible to the readers, it would be far more evident if it weren't authentic. And I'm inclined to believe that's true. Writers can't ever really control what readers take from a book. (And no matter how good the writer, some readers will end up reading a book that's the opposite of the one the writer meant to write.) But they can control that it's their voice, their style, their worldview, and it's likely that readers are very sensitive to that and know when it isn't real.

3 minutes ago, Mad Hatter said:

Oh interesting. Have you tried it?

No, although I made an account to try it. One day I'll get around to it.

19 minutes ago, Mistr said:

He tested negative for Covid earlier this week.

Two tests two days apart is the current guideline for symptomatic people.

Not sure how to handle an asymptomatic exposure like yours. I know asymptomatic testers need three tests (days 1, 3, and 5), but I don't know when to pull the trigger on deciding to test.

22 minutes ago, Mistr said:

I was going to ask if that is a real thing, but I see that it is. And the library has it. I am going to put that one on hold for now, since I can only handle reading one improve-your-life book at a time.

It's a real thing, and your library is pleasantly cooperative. I think it will be up your alley.

You are wise to put a quota on your life improvement efforts.

12 minutes ago, Mad Hatter said:

Body doubling could be fun though, wonder if we could create an NF group?

Time zones are always the killer, but otherwise doable.

There's also Focusmate, if that works. They give three free body doubling sessions a week, and aren't too expensive beyond that (though I see their price has gone up in the past year).

Body doubling. Which is to say, peer pressure. Find a drawing buddy to meet either in person or online to draw together. Or join an accountability group that discusses sketchbooks once a week so you need to have work to show them.

Yay, you got the job!!

20 minutes ago, TiogaGirl said:

That child will be fortunate to get to work with somebody as compassionate and knowledgeable about MH issues as you are.

This. This is very true.

Anxiety is normal before a new job, keep reminding yourself of that. Especially if you have some performance anxiety stemming from low self-esteem and generally hating yourself. It's a normal feeling, but you don't need to trust it, because it just wants to ruin things for you.

Six hours a week sounds fantastic for adding a new job to your week. And there are so many positive possibilities: a little extra money coming in, a little schedule structure to create places for all the other things you want to do (annoying to impose it, but it's usually helpful), helping a kid who needs you. It sounds amazing.